Harper attempting to take control over CBC.

[Thor]

If CBC had something awesome to offer on TV like the BBC does with its many amazing documentaries, or PBS with Frontline, Nova, etc... Then yeah I'd care, but CBC is craptastic.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

That is a valid debate, but also a totally different question than what my quote was answering.


But if you want to prevent the public broadcaster from bidding on their most lucrative product, that simply sounds like a loss for anyone with an interest in seeing the CBC succeed. If your goal is to see the CBC run into irrelevance then this would be a good step.

It goes back to wanting to reshape the CBC. Evaluating the CBC on if its profitable is stupid. If it was profitable it shouldnt exist because the private sector should be running it. The CBC needs to produce a niche canadian product that isnt availabe from the private sector. I would start with amateur sport, fact based instead of editorial based news and good documentries instead of alarmist reality style docudramas that the private sector puts out.

An example they should do more of were the Canada, a peoples history series. No private sector would have ever funded it and it produced good quality historical programming. Copying PBSs Americas Greatest Idea on the history of our National parks would be great as well. There is plenty that the CBC could do if they would just give up trying to compete with them private sector.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by GGG

There is plenty that the CBC could do if they would just give up trying to compete with them private sector.

... which they can only do with adequate funding.

[Oil Stain]

Originally Posted by SebC

... which they can only do with adequate funding.

According to the article it appears the government believes they spend too much on salaries, benefits and pensions and not enough on the programming aspect.

If they cut back on those first three then they would have more money for programming.

[TorqueDog]

We should make the CBC more like the BBC.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by GGG

It goes back to wanting to reshape the CBC. Evaluating the CBC on if its profitable is stupid. If it was profitable it shouldnt exist because the private sector should be running it. The CBC needs to produce a niche canadian product that isnt availabe from the private sector. I would start with amateur sport, fact based instead of editorial based news and good documentries instead of alarmist reality style docudramas that the private sector puts out.

An example they should do more of were the Canada, a peoples history series. No private sector would have ever funded it and it produced good quality historical programming. Copying PBSs Americas Greatest Idea on the history of our National parks would be great as well. There is plenty that the CBC could do if they would just give up trying to compete with them private sector.

Ok, fine I misspoke on profitable, but it shouldn't be an enormous black hole of spending and wasteful practices.

It also shouldn't be flailing around tossing money at completely unnecessary and stupid things like music distribution.

The best thing to do is to redefine CBC's mandate based on modern needs instead of allowing them to continue to run on their founding concepts.

It doesn't have to be profitable but it doesn't have to be badly run, and wastful either.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

We should make the CBC more like the BBC.

BBC is far superior with a tiny budget compared to CBC

• £3,606.3 million in licence fees collected from householders;
• £222 million from BBC Commercial Businesses;
• £279.4 million from government grants;
• £271.9 million from other income, such as providing content to overseas broadcasters and concert ticket sales;

[mrgreen]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

We should make the CBC more like the BBC.

The BBC receives $7.3-billion in public funding, broadcasts primarily in English and doesn’t span six time zones. That is $122 per person.

The CBC provides 27 national and international services, in English and French, and eight aboriginal languages. And for that, each Canadian pays annually about $30.

A little factoid that often goes unlooked when people say “Well, the BBC can do it, why can’t the CBC?!” Now you know.

http://www.insidethecbc.com/comparin...d-cbc-funding/

[GGG]

Originally Posted by SebC

... which they can only do with adequate funding.

Agreed, but before you give them any more funding you need to revamp the entire model. If you gave them more money now they would just increase their bid for HNIC. So before the question of funding is even raised the purpose ofthe CBC needs to change.

Even without an increase in funding CBC could do better by changing their mandate.

[edslunch]

Originally Posted by GGG

I would start with amateur sport, fact based instead of editorial based news and good documentries instead of alarmist reality style docudramas that the private sector puts out.

The panels and commentary are some of the more insightful and intelligent news programming on TV - I'd like to see more not less.

The CBC does produce good doucmentaries - e.g. DocZone

[GreenLantern2814]

Originally Posted by crazy_eoj

The superpowers of media didn't exist the way they do now the last time around though, and CBC lost part of the rights then.

There is just no way they can compete with Bell and Rogers anymore.

The NHL makes money on CBC. They'll pay what they need to to keep it. They're only bidding against bell, Rogers has shown no interest in putting on the type of broadcast HNIC does. And the only way they walk away is if Bell bids so much that they eliminate any chance of making money off it.

Cool to know that media Conglomerates are a new invention though.

[Matty81]

CBC TV is redundant and poor quality - should be folded up aside from newsworld but the whole anti-CBC ideological thing is a bit tinfoil hat. It seems to really fire up the extreme elements of the Conservative movement and rile up the wingnuts and the old coots. It's crazy how detached from actual history people today are to apply a label like propaganda to the CBC. Man we have it good in first world western nations.

Know a lot of people who listen to CBC radio a ton. These days it seems like a lot of people are so self centered that any government service they personally don't use is wasteful.

[Tinordi]

Take control of the CBC? You mean use it as a baseless threat for the mindless conservative supporters? Why yes:

Or if your tastes run to something more red-meat, privatize it, shut it down, whatever. That is what a real conservative government would have done. But as this is not a real conservative government, it has instead simply left the CBC as it is, adrift, purposeless, yet still consuming $1-billion of scarce public funds every year. It does so, for all its pretensions of concern for the taxpayer, because the CBC is more useful to it in its present state: not as a problem to be fixed, but as a platform on which to raise funds, a scapegoat for the party’s failures, a diversion for the base’s wrath.

As indeed it has done on a number of fronts. If media concentration is a concern, why has it not torn down the protectionist barriers to foreign ownership that are responsible for it? If wireless fees are an issue, why has it not opened the market to foreign competition, rather than take out ads attacking the industry? Why is a conservative government still in the monopoly mail business, in 2014? Why hasn’t Via Rail been reformed? Why, eight years later, does the federal government look pretty much the same as it did when the Conservatives took power?

Why? Because they are not interested in changing government, but in occupying it. The Conservatives are the “Ottawa elites” they decry, only they hope to dupe their supporters, for whose intelligence they evidently have abiding contempt, by keeping an army of convenient whipping boys on hand. And why not? It’s worked so far.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...rofit-from-it/